Follow my journey from Greece to Sweden and my quest for happiness, starting August 23rd 2014.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

20.000 views under the sea

This is not going to be a really big post. And its amazing to see less than a year in here 20.000 views.

I have been sick for the past 5 days with loads of fever and spent them in bed. Apart from today. Today i had a presentation at university in the environmental assessment course. For you interested in that, an environmental assessment is an activity/process that is used to determine the impact of projects or phenomena on the ecosystem/human health and they offer solutions, methods to minimize or prevent them.

I felt the need to write about what happened today. I had 39 fever and i made a colossal effort to stay awake all night and complete my presentation. I presented about the Great Barrier Reef and the effects of dredging and the politics behind this in the Australian government.

I was there sitting for 3 hours with burning eyes waiting patiently for my turn. We were around 10 people in the room plus the supervising professor, Henrik. He is pretty young, cool and helpful.

I spend hours in the presentation. I really did. When i hear the word presentation i expect some visual material, at least in academia. Or something innovative that will keep me interested or that i will be able to absorb the information.

So we were stuffed in a microscope room for presentations. The computer had issues working as well. Definitely not a great start! Moving on Erika starts first. I like how she is not only pretty but also very intelligent. She pays attention, she has always questions to ask and she has a vibrant and colorful personality too. I was a bit nervous because i did not know if i picked the correct structure for my topic. So she reassured me that i was in the right path after she finished.

The problems started after that. Another girl spoke for 3-4 minutes when the presentation should be around 15. She had around 8 slides when i had 22 so i started to worry again. Then another one showed up and she had only one picture with a few information and she went on to talk about her project for 10 minutes. It is very hard to retain all the information and make constructive criticism just like this.

Then another one from my group came on. She had an interesting project on wind mill parks in northern Sweden and the Sami people are protesting. And then she says she has no presentation. She pulls out a chunk of papers and starts reading from them. I frankly do not remember almost anything. And that makes me sad because i really liked the topic and i really like the Sami people.

Then my turn comes. I do great considering my condition. But when you are up there and you look at everyone, you are like a teacher. You see every detail going around. And i could not take my eyes off someone in the far back who was sleeping or trying to keep his eyes open every 10 seconds.

Most of the presentations had great topics and some came with good presenters too. But i felt really offended by the other occurrences. In the effort i put to make one and others didn't at least. I don't know maybe that's me. Maybe i do not expect this in a masters level program. Oh well.

Lastly i might make a review on the Dumb and Dumber To movie one day. It's is unreal. You should watch it in 24 monthly doses because i just close it every 5 minutes. Its unbelievably bad.